This is a long, technical but nonetheless fascinating look at the Guardian’s decision to switch off their Facebook app and end their experiment with what Facebook call frictionless sharing. One key factor is that people are more conscious of the privacy implications of over-sharing, and are more suspcious of Facebook than they used to be.
There is an unquantifiable long-term effect on the Guardian. It is one of the top three visited newspaper websites in the world, so the approach of channeling some traffic through Facebook clearly hasn’t greatly impeded growth.
But as I used to say, “I can show you an analytics graph with the numbers of people visiting. I can’t show you an analytics graph of the number of people being annoyed.”
Over recent months, since I left the Guardian, I’ve observed a lot of user testing sessions where people are very nervous about clicking any kind of Facebook sign-in or integration button, expressing concern that they don’t know what it will do, and don’t want everybody to know everything that they are reading.
This must be a worry for Facebook, although it isn’t by any means universal. Only yesterday I observed a session where a woman explained that she was more than happy to share whatever news she was reading. “There is no secret in reading the newspaper. It isn’t porn” she said. But the longer legacy of “frictionless sharing” might not be lots of rows logged in a database somewhere, but an impact on the willingness of users to activate features that involve Facebook.
The rise and #fail of the Guardian Facebook app.
via We Study Media
